Broadening...

Yeah, I'm over 50 so the title could just as well relate to my waistline. I've recently had the ignominity of the wife asking if I'd join her at Slimming World.....

But I'm not referring to waistlines today.

It seems fair to say that my Blogger site gets very few views these days. I'm not sure if that's because blogger is a bit of a blogging dead end or not. All I know is that the sites I have on Blogger seem to have a pretty restricted audience and I can only look on jealously at those on other platforms getting large viewing numbers.

I've never really got on with Wordpress, but it does seem to be one of the top blogging sites, so I'm gonna have to suck it up and crack on and create content on there.

But as most people these days seem to have multiple accounts on multiple platforms, I'm jumping on the bandwagon and I've set up accounts on Wordpress  and Gab.

Let's see how things go.
I have almost 10 years worth of posting on blogger, so it's a bit sad to be thinking of abandoning ship. There's a fair bit of history in these black and orange pages.

Gab is fresh and new, I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet. YouTube may be another thing I need to stake a claim on.

Do I need to do Twitter as well? hmm, maybe. I think I need a whole raft of "Delphiusdebate" accounts setting up all over the place so there's some form of consistency. 

I'm working this weekend so maybe over the next week I'll get the ducks in a row and start  creating new accounts.

Alternative Influence Network: The New Russia

In the past week Data & Society released a report on what they call the Alternative Influence Network. Basically a loose collection of YouTube vloggers nominally not of the left i.e. vloggers that call themselves moderate, classic liberal, or libertarian.

The report aims to attach these moderate vloggers to Racist Extremists through the process of degrees of separateion. For instance vloggers that have never espoused extreme right-wing views are being smeared because they chatted to someone who chatted to someone else who hosted a right-wing extremist to debunk their viewpoints. Talk about desperate!

This report has been timed quite critically, coming a week after vlogger Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad - he of the link over on the right  of my page) really got involved in polituics and went to Brussels on behalf of UKIP to highlight the new legislation going through the EU Parliament to stifle the internet.

So a week after he gets involved with an honest to goodness real life political party, all of a sudden a smear campaign is launched to discredit him and other non-leftist vloggers.

The report is worth a read, because of the degrees to which credibility is stretched to link these vloggers to white supremacists is well, incredible.

To say for instance that someone two or three links away from Sargon are tainted by white male supremacy (even the vloggers who are not white, nor male) is a pretty paranoid viepoint. Under normal circumstances it would be ignored and more than likely ridiculed. But because it esposes the leftist media viewpoint that someone has to be to blame for the loss of control of alternative media, leftist corporations will pick this report up, swallow it as gospel and use it to shadow-ban or completely ban these vloggers, even if they have not proffered a far-right viewpoint.

This is exactly the same leftist fear-mongering that started during Brexit and the Trump campaigs. In those instances Russia was to blame, for influencing the result of both votes. Note Russia doesn't seem to be to blame for Labour losing the general election. They were so shit even their Soviet sponsors couldn't influence that election even though the Tories were consistently crap throughout the campaign.

But it's the same old lefty whinging:  "it's not my fault people won't listen to me, someone must be to blame!" It can't be that your viewpoint is bollocks, that people just aren't convinced that your supposed utopia is achievable and that they definitely don't want to lose all their freedom to attain this socialist nirvana.

For many years, I've been here writing this blog and I must admit it does seem to be a bit echoey in here: there are no comments like there used to be, viewing stats are abysmal and I do often wonder if there is a bit of that creative filtering going on to stop my viewpoint being viewed widely. Way back in the early days of this blog I used to get regular comments and encouragement from some of the top bloggers of the day, such as Anna Raccoon (RIP).

These days, not a jot. Just maybe I was the Sargon of my Day. I don't know and have no way of proving any censorship. But if it has happened to me, then it can and probably will happen to those liberal blogs and vlogs out there just so the leftist media can continue to spout their BS unopposed.

The vloggers of YouTube have to be on guard and aware. The right also need to start looking at alternative content providers in order to keep the contrasting opinions out there.

When in a Hole, Remember to Stop Using the Spade.

Labour seem insistent on committing suicide.

The latest thing they've done to join the Liberals in political irrelevance is to vote for a second referendum. Of course Jeremy Corbyn said he would repect how the party conference voted.

So they voted for a second referendum.

Bloody good job, well done. Let's ignore the first referendum result and go and vote for a second bite at staying in the EU, or even worse accepting any shit deal the EU force us to accept.

Wonderful.

I very much doubt there won't be an option to forget the 26th of July and go back to the status quo. After all to be fair, we've already decided to exit the EU, we just need to decide which leave option to chose.

But knopwing politicians, they will slip in a "stay in the EU and forget the past two years" option into the options list of any second referendum.

All those Northern Labour voters that voted to leave need to understand that voting for Labour is not a vote for the working class working man. Not any more.

This is about as clear a statement of that there is.

UPDATE:

I had a think about this last night and I can't square the issue of Labour's avowed intention to nationalise everything in sight and this latest spasm (spresm?) of voting to have a second referendum with the option to stay in the EU/customs union/single market.

Being in the EU means that the government of the UK has no alternative but to privatise certain industries. It's EU policy intent on creating competition  (don't snigger at the back!).

So how could a future Labour government (look, I've told you once about that sniggering!) be part of the EU and nationalise industries the EU says they cannot nationalise?

Interesting quandry....

Brexit - IEA Steps in with size Nines.

Okay, let's reprise where we are up to at the moment with Brexit.

Mrs May originally had David Davies the Brexit minister working on the Brexit strategy and he came up with the Canada ++ option where we are fully out of the EU, the customs Union and the single market. We then negotiate from being fully out, to cherry picking the best bits of previous EU trade deals with other third countries like Canada and Japan. That then becomes a framework for the UK to interact with the EU in a more or less frictionless way with the EU.  Sure there will be some border checks, but the majority of trade will be pre-approved and minimal checks will take place. The N.I. border will not be an issue as goods being transferred across the border from North to South will already be to EU standards, guaranteed. It just requires the regulatory framework to be agreed, which could be a self-financing approvals body that checks companies to ensure products are made to EU standards. It could be paid for by the companies wishing to trade with the EU, or it could be paid for by the taxpayer, but it would be a whole lot less than £40-80 billion to run.

Then the Maybot and her henchmen chopped David Davies' proposal off at the legs and came up with the chequers proposal, whereby the UK will exit the political EU entity, but will stay in the customs union and sinle market, but somehow will not be signed up to free movement of people and will not be subject to ECJ edicts. Since Chequers, EU heads of state have been making approving noises about the proposal, but they are not the EU commission.

Then last week the EU catagorically rejected chequers. Understandably and predictably, because what it requires is for the EU to modify ECC and EFTA membership requirements, specifically the free movment of people and the primacy of the ECJ. Ain't gonna happen just because one country requests it. Even the sweetener of collecting EU import taxes and the UK being subject to EU tariff regimes wasn't enough.

So, that's where we stand at the moment.

Today, the IEA launched their own version of Brexit, which Big Bad Boris seems to prefer. I'm going to have a butchers at it and see where it compares to David Davies' proposal and whether it does indeed form a "proper" Br-exit from the EU.